Tennessee Williams’ play A Streetcar Named Desire is a pressure cooker of human emotions that range from rage to passion, jealousy to loyalty, dark shame to glaring honesty and more. Director Peter Callendar coaxes the versatile actors of the African-American Shakespeare Company actors to dive fearlessly into the shadowy and steamy soul of this play and resurface in a beautiful catharsis.

The characters are pitched together in a muggy closeness in a tiny and cramped New Orleans apartment where live Stanley Kowalski and his wife Stella in their domestic sensual bliss which is soon disrupted.

Stanley, a strong, hardworking ordinary guy (solidly played by Khary Moye), reveres the bond of brothers that are his poker buddies and regards his home, as Huey Long suggested, as his castle where he is the king. Stella is his steadfast and open-armed wife (given great presence by Santoya Fields), loving her life with Stanley and a grounding force to his volatile temper.

When Stella’s sister Blanche DuBois (the ethereally beautiful yet fragile Jemier Jenkins) enters the scene in a crisp and glamorous white dress and hat, she is as out of place as an orchid in a back alley. Blanche projects herself as a delicate southern belle, but we soon learn the dark and tangled roots that comprise her past. Jenkins brings a delicately nuanced desperation to Blanche who clings to the image she wishes to project, and protect, to keep at bay the. terror of confronting her own reality. Blanche is practiced in the southern playbook of manners and gentility, but she wears them like a mask, a mask she desperately clings to because the truth is too painful.

The subtle but palpable tension between Blanche and Stanley begins to simmer in the first act, with Stanley being annoyed as Blanch e’s sense of entitlement and superiority that threaten his stance and personhood. There ensues a battle of wits, with Blanche desperately trying to maintain the veneer that Stanley increasingly chips away at in his pursuit of what he thinks is the truth. But Stanley’s truth is one of force, like that of prying open a rose bud before it has bloomed to find out what it’s made of. Blanche has her own truth, the magic and grace of beauty, delicacy, and gentility that, as phony as it seems, is the only thing keeping her from the depths of darkness and death.

Williams’ characters must navigate the subtle dichotomies of gentility and brutality, the difference between seeing life in the warm light of a festive lantern or the harsh glare of a bare bulb that hangs almost ominously over the kitchen table. Especially noteworthy is Fred Pitts as Mitch, the “decent” guy who is drawn to Blanche before he eventually sees her in the harsh light.

Callender has taken a bold and original move to present this Williams play with black actors and somehow raise it above the “southerness” to make it universal.

The end of the play is sad as we witness Blanche having disintegrated in her terror and confusion, overwhelmed by the dark evidence of her reality that Stanley managed to unearth. She is cornered like an animal, panicked by the hostile handlers who do not speak her language or understand her, until she is approached by the kind doctor (Nathaniel Andalis) who extends his hand in gracious invitation to come to take her away. It would have been good to have the doctor’s gestures exaggerated in hyperbolic southern gentility, a dance that Blanche has done many times to make her acceptance even more convincing.

This show is ending too soon, with March 18 being the last performance. Try to see it if you can.